Part III. From failure to self-destruction — The realm of psychology

Part III. From failure to self-destruction — The realm of psychology

Due to the moral stance with which individuals settle into
state, competition and private life, the bourgeois world is full of character
masks. These are people who freely decide all the time and pride themselves
quite a bit on their decisions, even though the whole time they are making
themselves useful for purposes that they do not even know and that they hotly
deny when someone says what they are; people who march through the landscape of
imperialism with a masterful air because they emphasize their subjectivity
regardless of the content they give this subjectivity through their
thoughts and actions; who, apart from everything they are forced to do and let themselves
in for, cultivate their subjectivity by gearing themselves explicitly for being
the means for a success that does not come about through their deeds —
i.e., by striving beyond their ordinary occupation for a success (“self-confidence,”
“recognition,” “self-fulfillment”) that makes them satisfied.

Going-along-with-things as method

These are people who enjoy their arbitrariness in thousands of
idiotic calculations of advantage and disadvantage and find nothing more
reasonable than the necessity of rule; who regard a thought as something
impersonal due to its generality and therefore, when thinking, insist above all
on the specialness of their personal opinion — and who are so hopelessly alike
in their views of themselves and the rest of the world. After all, the wild
variety of different characters is of course not due to individuals having
thought about which general purposes they want to achieve, and for which
reasons, and what they consider to be essential or unimportant for them; but
rather is due both to the resolve to assert oneself within the bounds of
possibility — the intention to cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth
depending on individual experience — and to lending this going-along-with-things
the semblance of shrewd wisdom and savoir-vivre.

Nothing testifies to this sad working of bourgeois rule more
clearly than the popular catchphrase of “self- realization,”
by which people high and low in the social hierarchy affirm what a lofty ideal
they have concocted for themselves with their “ego” and how independent they
imagine themselves to be from what their dear “self” is forced and prepared to
do. They even go so far as to deny the antagonism between their concerns and
the twin powers of modern state and business management when they notice that
their ideal of themselves is not being met: as true psychologists, they invent
character defects, repressions, and inhibitions in themselves that leave
nothing of their free will. And similarly when it comes to other people, they
refuse to examine the purposes to which their consciousness and actions
conform, preferring to look for “motives” such as self-assertion and
recognition that they have always already identified.

The pretension of coping in an exceptional way with the world
to which one is conforming passes as character, as demonstrating “Look
how well I know how to master life!” — while the citation of one’s negative particularity,
of “Look what I lack for mastering life!” goes under the heading of illness.
In fact, this citation is something completely different, namely a
sophisticated technique of the moral subject who is out to assert
himself most firmly in his failure, of all things, i.e., a very
self-destructive act of free will; and while this refutes the whole of
psychology, it nevertheless inspires its apostles to ever new arts of
interpretation. The representatives of this science know only too well that it
has adopted the medical ethos of providing practical help while having settled
down into its helplessness. After all, it has long since succeeded in transforming
its “therapeutic problems” into a weltanschauung that is at the service of all
advocates of a “healthy” moral subjectivity, whether these advocates be
football coaches or sanctimonious clerics.